It is a weird custom of the Washington windbag to follow sentences like this with a lengthy introduction of the next speaker.

Normally, this is pointless, since that person is most often well-known to everyone within the sound of the speaker’s voice, but the introduction is made nonetheless.

In that spirit, we’d like to begin the News Blast this week with some introductions of our own.

Let’s start with Assistant Secretaries of State Roberta Jacobson and Tom Malinowski who, as McClatchy reported, testified this week against imposing punitive economic sanctions on Venezuela.

Jacobson, who spoke for State’s Western Hemisphere Affairs Bureau, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that hitting Venezuela’s government with sanctions as a tactic to cool its political crisis “would serve to reinforce a narrative of the Venezuelan government standing up to the United States — rather than the Venezuelan people standing up for themselves.”

Malinowski, speaking for State’s Human Rights Bureau, added on sanctions: “They work in some places, they don’t work everywhere. Timing is extremely important.”

These top State Department policymakers who oppose sanctions on Venezuela should discuss their “counterproductive” effects with the people who maintain our fifty-plus year old embargo on the government and people of Cuba.

While we’re at it, let’s also introduce the State Department policymakers who track Cuba on the fight against illegal drugs and terrorism.

In March, when the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs released a report giving high marks to Cuba’s counter-narcotics efforts, it said “Cuba demonstrates increasing willingness to apprehend and turn over U.S. fugitives and to assist in U.S. judicial proceedings by providing documentation, witnesses and background for cases in U.S. state and federal Courts.”

Yet, barely one month later, when the Bureau of Counterterrorism released the 2013 Report on the State Sponsors of Terror, it said “The Cuban government continued to harbor fugitives wanted in the United States” to justify keeping Cuba on the list.

Different fugitives, we know. But, shouldn’t these guys talk?

Our last introduction is for Secretary of State, John Kerry, who gave a speech about the importance of entrepreneurship at a gathering of the Council of the Americas this week. At the end, he zeroed in on Cuba.

Secretary Kerry is worried that the Cuban people will “continue to be left behind (economically) as the rest of the hemisphere advances,” unless more can be done to strengthen “the emerging micro-entrepreneurial sector in Cuba.”

There is no shortage of ideas for stimulating more economic activity in Cuba. One came from Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, a staunch conservative and an anti-communist. In March, Becker, who died this week, wrote: “It is time to end the embargo on the export and import of goods and services between the United States and Cuba. The Cuban people will benefit almost immediately.”

Also this week, the Boston Globe, Secretary Kerry’s hometown newspaper, made the political case for economic engagement with Cuba:

“There’s a reason why the United States doesn’t normally cut all ties to countries with repressive regimes. Economic engagement can be as powerful, or more powerful, a force for change than isolation. It doesn’t erase tensions with offending regimes, but rather puts more pressure on them. It expresses to the people living under the regime a desire for cooperation; opportunities to better understand each other; and a closer look at American-style freedoms and democracy.”

Despite these powerful arguments — that ending economic sanctions would provide Cubans with greater economic opportunity and the chance for greater freedoms, just as Secretary Kerry said he wanted in his speech — there’s a catch. To accomplish these goals, we’d have to introduce him to the same person who kept Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terror List and who will not advocate publicly for increased travel and trade opportunities for Americans and Cubans.

By now, we’re sure you’re on to us. There is a reason the Venezuela sanctions people don’t need an introduction to the Cuba Sanctions people, or the officials tracking drug fugitives to the policy makers who keep the terror list, or the supporters of microenterprise to the supporters of economic sanctions.

They’re all the same guys. A lot of them smart and really good people.

It is the problem that needs no introduction, familiar to all within the sound of our voice.

Until our leaders confront the hardliners in Congress and the political culture that keeps these irrational, inconsistent, and ineffective policies in place, they’ll just go on behaving like people who’ve never met.

Yesterday, The John F. Kennedy Library posted a “JFK in History” piece to mark the 53rd anniversary of what it called “a botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba.”

The invasion was a CIA covert operation with the goal of overthrowing the Castro government. Kennedy was determined to conceal U.S. support for the operation and, as the entry explains, the “landing point at the Bay of Pigs was part of the deception.” In the days before April 17th, the operation was exposed, American support for the invasion was revealed, and the small army composed largely of Cuban exiles was defeated.

It is no accident of history that ZunZuneo, the faux “Cuban Twitter” program revealed this month by the Associated Press, has been ridiculed in headlines as “The Bay of Tweets.” Fifty-three years later, the United States is still engaged in activities to overthrow Cuba’s government, and still misusing the dark arts of government secrecy and deniability to obscure them, with consequences so familiar, it is as if a new generation of public officials has arrived at positions of power ignorant of their own country’s history.

In the 1970s, The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, led by Senator Frank Church, was formed to review a series of efforts to overthrow foreign governments, spy on U.S. citizens, and conceal those activities from the Congress and the American people. Time and again, the Committee invoked the Bay of Pigs as evidence of the damage that is inflicted on our national security and the U.S. system by excessive reliance on secrecy.

As the Committee wrote in its final report:

“The task of democratic government is to reconcile conflicting values…Reliance on covert action has been excessive because it offers a secret shortcut around the democratic process. This shortcut has led to questionable foreign involvements and unacceptable acts…Finally, secrecy has been a tragic conceit. Inevitably, the truth prevails, and policies pursued on the premise that they could be plausibly denied, in the end damage America’s reputation and the faith of her people in their government.” Final Report, Page 16.

Following the report, Congress established a more formal system of oversight over intelligence activities and strengthened the legal requirements for the White House and executive branch agencies to report intelligence activities and covert actions.

Fast forward from the Bay of Pigs and the Church Committee to ZunZuneo, and you can see why some reporters are following the scandal so closely and why experts like Professor Bill LeoGrande have directly challenged repeated government denials that the program was covert:

“USAID’s ZunZuneo program meets the two key definitional attributes of a covert action: it was intended to influence Cuban politics, and the U.S. government’s role was intentionally hidden.”

In the earlier stages of the story, USAID flatly denied that ZunZuneo had any intent to influence Cuba’s politics. As the AP reported, when Senator Patrick Leahy asked administrator Rajiv Shah whether its goal was to “influence political conditions abroad” or “to encourage popular opposition to the Cuban government,” Shah replied “No, that is not correct.”

Once AP published patently political text messages from ZunZuneo that contradicted Dr. Shah’s testimony, the State Department started ducking questions at its daily briefing from reporters asking for an inventory of the text messages.

Indeed, on April 9, April 11, April 14, and April 17, when reporters asked questions like “How goes the USAID review of these allegedly political text messages?,” the answer from the State Department has been “Nothing new to report today,” “I would encourage you to check in with my colleagues at USAID,” and, “I don’t have any updates from here. I know they’re looking into it.”

Such evasions can’t really work when the facts point so strongly to covert actions that should have been reported to the Congress. As Peter Kornbluh explained in an interview to Jeremy Bigwood: “Zunzuneo had all the components of a classic covert action: shell companies, off-shore bank accounts, managerial cutouts, multinational locations, the goal of regime change, and, of course, the hidden hand of the United States government.”

Therefore, as Bill LeoGrande writes, “under the law (50 U.S. Code § 3093 (a)), [it] required a presidential finding and notification of the Congressional intelligence committees. Those obligations do not appear to have been met.”

And so we have our Bay of Tweets: another covert action, another effort to conceal the truth from the American people, another deceit in our endless mission to bring democracy to Cuba.

“A democracy that violates the rights and privacy of its citizens and conceals its activities from them edges dangerously near something other than a democracy. The most radical of our founders, Thomas Jefferson, held that the best guarantor of the American republic was the good judgment and common sense of the American people, a people fully informed of the activities of its government on their behalf.”

Not long after President Obama returned to The White House from his holiday vacation, he was greeted by headlines in the national press about attacks on his leadership by his former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates.

In leaks from his forthcoming memoir, “Duty,” Mr. Gates writes of Obama’s skepticism toward his own policy on Afghanistan. “For him,” he writes, “it’s all about getting out.”

While Bob Woodward, like others in the ranks of Washington pundits, reported this as a “harsh judgment” against the President’s leadership on national security, Ron Fournier, writing in the National Journal, took a more sympathetic view.

Where Gates attacks the President for complaining about a policy he inherited and for doubting his own commanders, Fournier writes: “We need more of that.”

According to Fournier, the President was reflecting the desires of the public to exit two unpopular wars, and demonstrating the kind of skepticism, curiosity, and reflection that is the president’s job. In other words, President Obama was leading by following the better angels of his nature to where they might lead him.

Before his election in 2008, President Obama said, “It is time for us to end the embargo against Cuba.” He justified his position by saying the policy had not helped Cubans enjoy rising living standards; instead, it squeezed innocents and didn’t improve human rights. “It’s time for us to acknowledge” he said, “that particular policy had failed.”

While then-Senator Obama adhered to the traditional goals of U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba, he also acknowledged the simple reality that the embargo failed to achieve them.

We don’t expect President Obama to seek repeal of the embargo anytime soon, but we do believe that 2014 could be a year of greater openings toward Cuba, even if it means the President has to be the same kind of leader that made Robert Gates so angry.

After all, he has done it before. In reopening Cuba to travel by Americans of Cuban descent, restoring categories of people-to-people travel, and negotiating with the Cuban government on issues such as migration and postal service, we saw the President set aside the views of his opponents, and even members of his own party, like Senator Bob Menendez, to put forward important and effective policy reforms that reflect his principles, his pragmatism, and the views of the American public writ large.

Going forward, there is much that President Obama can do using his executive authority.

Like many of our allies, The Center for Democracy in the Americas supports making all forms of people-to-people travel possible using a general license.

We strongly support direct negotiations with Cuba’s government to produce an action plan on the environment –so essential as Cuba looks to resume oil drilling in 2015– and ending the bar on Cuba’s participation in next year’s Summit of the Americas, which would give the United States a greater opening in Latin America more broadly. In addition, our research on gender equality in Cuba has led us to support policies to help Cuban women weather the transition in the island’s economy and provide real support for Cubans who choose to open small businesses.

In his epic song, Muros y Puertas, our friend Carlos Varela writes, “Since the world began, one thing has been certain, some people build walls, while others open doors.”

In 2014, we hope the President’s policy continues to reflect just this spirit of openness. It is better to open doors than build walls, or even Gates, for that matter.